Monday, April 19, 2010

The Final (days of) Four

Griffin and I spent a lot of time together the last 3 days he was 4 years old, while his sister and brother were at Camp PEP.

We did art together, we walked in the woods. He ate lunch with his Daddie at work and, on the last day, we had a grand adventure down in Centre Ville. He rode the carousel and we wandered around the Palais du Justice. Here are some photos of our adventures.

The Palais du Justice (shown below) is the ancient parliamentary buildings of the entire Franch Comté. They were built between 1584 and 1585 and are a national historical monument. According to the sign out front, the multicolored stone expresses “all the ornamental elements of the mannerist Renaissance period” So there! After Besancon was finally conquered by France in 1674 by Louis XIV, it continued to be use for parliamentary purposes. Now it is part of a law school. Griffin is very into dancing lately and made up his own funky dance in honor of the Palais (see video).

We walked onward, passing the ancient artillery school, an old ad painted on the side of a building and the glory of the spring gardens of Besancon. The town puts quite a lot of time and energy into making the gardens beautiful.

As you may remember from an earlier blog, Griffin decided he would learn to ride his bike when he was 5 years old. Even though he was still two days away, we removed his training wheels and his pedals so he could start this momentous process. As you can see from the video – he caught on quickly to balancing without relying on those wheels. Of course, he fell a few times but he was extremely coachable and had a great attitude, he just kept on trying and trying until he got it! We were so proud.